Making Fruitcake With the Cochin Rotary Club

Meanwhile, back in India ... Even though it was mid-October and the last day of Ramadan, Christmas was in the air, at least at the Cochin Rotary Club's annual fruitcake-making event, held in a very air conditioned meeting room on the roof of a hotel near the airport. It was a very westernized establishment--marble floors, shiny light fixtures, entire staff decked out in uniforms. (Thanks to Peter for some of the great pictures!)

Here we are with Paul Wilkes, a former Pitt writing teacher of mine who I've kept up with over the past 20(!) years. Paul is essentially the orphanage's benefactor, and he encouraged us to visit. Here's a bit about Paul from Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wilkes


Here's a description of the event from a Christmas op-ed that I wrote and that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published:

Can you catch the Christmas spirit in sun-baked Australia? (A sidetrip to India helps.)

"So where does a visitor to a sun-baked former British colony go for an English yuletide fix? To another former British colony, of course -- the hotter the better.

During a two-week school break in October, my family and I ventured to the tropical city of Kochi, on the southern tip of India. In a country swirling with sometimes absurd contrasts, we found ourselves one night on the guest list for the Kochi Rotary Club's annual fund-raiser preparations.

That night, the last night of Ramadan, with calls to prayer echoing from mosque-mounted loudspeakers, I gained some holiday equilibrium in an unlikely setting -- via an unlikely agent of memories of Christmas' past.

Whisked from the dusty streets to the roof of a Western-style airport hotel, my family and I stepped through the doors of a well-cooled conference room and into the looming presence of ... raw fruitcake! A mound of it, perhaps 20 feet long. Brown dough flecked with red and orange bits of dried fruit, piled on a table .

Each year the Rotary Club meets to prepare fruitcakes for sale to support its good works. On this night, dozens of members gathered around the table of fruitcake fixings, decked out in tall, white, stiffly pleated chef hats, long black-and-white-striped aprons and skin-toned surgical gloves.

Many of them grasped clear-glass bottles of brandy. On the emcee's cue, they raised the liquid high above their heads, toasted the season and flipped the bottles upside down, splashing gallons of liquor over the dough. A stinging rush of alcohol fumes enveloped the room like a hospital ER. In the next instant, dozens of pairs of rubber-gloved hands gleefully clawed at the heady mixture as empty flasks clanked to the floor and novice bakers shrieked in delight.

In this steamy Hindu nation, my mind flashed back to fruitcake in Pittsburgh: Moldy and sticky in a lidded tin pan, discovered on a cupboard shelf in an Oakland apartment on a June afternoon; Johnny Carson and the Post-Gazette's Peter Leo, poking fun at the perennial holiday delicacy that also serves as a doorstop; and my father-in-law meticulously slicing his homemade fruitcake for the annual Christmas party, arranging thin dark slabs on a dessert plate in the warm red and dark wood dining room of his Murray Avenue home.

The Power of Fruitcake. Who knew?"